By WeightWatchers.com
Photo:Google Images
Not happy with your reflection or brimming with body confidence? Unsurprisingly, you’re not alone. But sadly there are too many women are embarrassed with their bodies and giving their figure the thumbs down. New research from the University of Queensland shows that about 80% of Australian women are unhappy with their body image.
Can taking one, small step really change your life? Proponents of kaizen think so. (And for the record, so do I.) Kaizen is a means of making great and lasting change through small, steady increments. Kaizen’s practical roots are based in the Japanese management concept for incremental (gradual, continuous) change (improvement): breaking tasks into small, manageable steps.
If you desire radical change in your life, you must WANT radical change. In today’s vlog I riff about the importance of surrendering to our desire for change. If you don’t truly want to change then you’ll continue to stay in the same cycle. I encourage you to join me in the ego outing process and share a habit you’ve had trouble changing. Getting honest is the first step to true surrender.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
-Arthur Ashe (1943-1993); American tennis player, social activist
“Compliments are the helium that fills everyone’s balloon; they elevate the person receiving them so he or she can fly over life’s troubles and land safely on the other side.”
-Bernie S. Siegel M.D.; Author
“Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.”
— Martha Beck
I am…
thread
bare-
ly-
breath-
ing…
I am…
a
marching
woman
warrior
with
many
whys…
weeping
as
the
numbness
is
seeping
deeper.
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar.
When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.
If you’ve failed to keep your resolutions, Martha Beck has a way for you to succeed this year: by joining forces with the people you least resemble (and, often, most want to throttle).
By Martha Beck
Last year four of my friends—Marlene, Ellie, Karla, and Chip—all resolved to get in shape and lose weight. Now, these people had never met, so the odds of their making exactly the same resolution were…actually quite predictable, since pretty much everybody puts fitness on their New Year’s resolutions list. There are rumors of humans who’ve never resolved to eat less and move more, but until scientists discover concrete evidence (hair, fibers, DNA-smeared doughnut boxes), we must assume they exist only in hallucinations of ordinary people who’ve been weakened by months and months of dieting.
At any rate, by last February all my friends had fallen off the resolution wagon and were munching their way to larger clothing sizes and a profound sense of failure. Something similar may happen to you this year, whatever your resolutions.If it does, don’t blame your weak will; blame isolation. Research shows that humans tend to do difficult things much better in teams and groups than on their own. I suggest that this year you seek a specific type of goal-oriented companionship I call the Fellowship of the Resolution.
The Virtue of Motley Crews
If you loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s TheLord of the Rings (or hated it but absorbed the plot because of peer pressure), you’ll recall that the Fellowship of the Ring was a team consisting of hobbits, humans, a dwarf, a wizard, and an elf. Although these species usually avoided one another, their disparities turned out to be essential for saving Middle Earth. The Fellowship met monsters only a hobbit could trick, caves only a dwarf could spelunk, spells only an elf could counter, and orcs whose strength could be overcome only by Viggo Mortensen’s flexing of his facial muscles, paralyzing the beasts with acute awareness of their inferior looks.
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, you, too, need a Fellowship. But it’s not enough to enlist your longtime BFFs—the buddies you’ve known forever, who think and act just like you. As Tolkien’s story suggests, the key to success is teaming up with people who are emphatically not on your wavelength. This is especially true in behavioral patterns called conative styles.
Stalk the Clock
Shake off the Shock
Highs and Lows
And So it Goes…
Sleepless Black
The papers Stack
Words that Spill
While she Heals
Break, she May…
Vows to Stay
In the Game
Without the Shame.
I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was
and it turns out I’m OK. He
A Pair
The black and white cat
means to get off
the screened-in porch.
Castrated but suave,
he lives with this older woman
whose husband, dead thirty years,
secretly puts his cheek to hers
in a dime store photograph.
The children no longer visit.
The cat holds all the threads
of her detonated psyche.
He is the master key without
a lock. She picks him up.
The porch screen has been mended.
He thinks there are the old openings.
Birds, insects leap
out of the flecked light.
Inside the screen, her hands
stroke his electric body.
In the Next Galaxy
by Ruth Stone
“The real voyage of discovery consists
not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes.”
by
Marcel Proust
I consider myself to be among the walking wounded (as I believe… we all are)… and if we as a people have never felt the infinite void caused by losing a loved one… perhaps a Sister, Brother, Mother or Father or quite possibly, your Mother and your Father within a span of six months as I recently did…or you’ve not yet felt the sting of personal failure, the humility while asking for financial assistance, or needing a handout of food and/or possibly food stamps in order to feed your belly that’s been empty with an ache which seems like an eternity… or had to ask for help feeding yourself because you’re too sick to lift the fork. We all get a turn if we’re blessed to live long enough and that’s a fact… I
